glowtown
Glowtown exhibited at the Kansas State Fair, Summer 2010
“In the summer of 1999 at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, I was given the opportunity to create Glowtown, a workshop for kids that was directly inspired by ‘Tips’ - an installation I did at the museum the year before. With a group of about 30 children, we worked together for an entire day building a town that consisted of cotton dental rolls, glue, cardboard, popsicle sticks, and luminous paint. The very simple idea was to create a fictitious community that would be transformed when the glow paint was activated by turning the lights on and off.
Since then, I have conducted workshops all across the country at many different venues, from museums to arts centers to gymnasiums and even on corporate campuses. Participants have included young children to high school students to adults in corporate team building retreats. They are dynamic, high energy environments that are full of imagination, creativity, and freedom. Using simple material that is normally just thrown away or recycled, kids and adults discover the wonder of creating something from nothing, transforming trash into art!”
video:
Glowtown Workshop, Ketchum, Idaho
April 2011
slideshow:
Glowtown Workshop
Greensburg, Kansas, at the school gym for elementary, middle school, and high school children.
May 17 - 21, 2010
Organized by the 5.4.7. Arts Center
press:
Langston, Lauren, "Art Professor Sharon Louden: Anything but 'Boring'," Her Campus Vanderbilt, January 24, 2012 (PDF)
Bossick, Karen, "Glow Town emerges from trash," The Weekly Sun, April 13, 2011 (PDF)
"Building Glowtown," Dodge City Daily Globe, May 28, 2010 (JPG)
Local Birmingham, AL, TV station interviews Sharon about her
Glowtown Workshop at the Birmingham Museum of Art (2008).
“Glowtown is an art-making workshop that develops individual creativity and teamwork within a community-building environment. By using everyday, simple, cast-away materials, along with the magic of glow-in-the-dark paint, participants come together to invent a fantastical world that never existed before, both during the day and at night!”
Special thanks to Golden Artist Colors, Inc., for their very generous donations of luminous, phosphorescent paint to these workshops.